Road trips and letting the pasta drive

Flavored pasta brings plenty to the table tastewise, so stick with a few simple ingredients. Recipe of sorts below.

We took a road trip to St. Louis last weekend. This was supposed to be a nice, chatty post about the wonderful, underrated city where I grew up and some of its unexpected delights. But things are suddenly hectic at Blue Kitchen. So today I’m just going to focus on its farmers market and one of the delights we discovered there.

Soulard Farmers Market is one of the oldest farmers markets in America and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. It’s been in continuous operation since 1838.

It’s also one of the most colorful farmers markets around. That, as much as the cheap produce to be had, made it part of more Saturdays than not when we lived there and a required stop anytime we visit now. Not manufactured colorfulness like mimes and face painters, either—I’m talking white-haired old ladies sucking down cold cans of Busch beer while doing their weekly shopping at 10 in the morning.

Besides local produce and not so local stuff [I’m assuming the bananas and kiwis I saw weren’t locally grown], you’ll find plants and cut flowers for sale; baked goods [both artisanal and otherwise]; an excellent spice shop; fresh meat; live rabbits, ducks and chickens waiting to become fresh meat; and a pet shop where live animals await a decidedly happier fate. We were happy to learn this visit that the pet shop serves as a kind of no-kill shelter. The kittens and puppies they sell aren’t from pet factories or puppy mills—they take in unwanted litters from people in the neighborhood. And they seem to do a land office business.

There are also purveyors of T-shirts; incense; sunglasses; “art” on mirrors, velvet and other, um, interesting surfaces; tiny doughnuts pumped out and fried by an ingenious little machine that not only cooks and flips them before your eyes, but also lures a steady stream of customers—and last Saturday, at least, a genius of a salesman/showman on par with Ron Popeil and Ed McMahon—Ken Baker. His demonstration of the Super-Shammy, his own invention, bordered on performance art. We bought some. If he had a website, I’d even provide a link here. But he only does business through a P.O. box in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and on QVC and the Home Shopping Network.

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The Joy of Cooking, at 90 miles an hour

Chicken and Mushrooms with Farfalle comes together quickly with a flavor boost from tarragon and brandy. Recipe below.

Quick, what comes to mind when I say cooking? I’m guessing you’ve probably started fantasizing about standing in a warm, pristine kitchen on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon and luxuriating in playing with ingredients, preparing for an intimate dinner party for friends or a leisurely family dinner. Things are marinating. Whole heads of garlic are roasting in the oven. Maybe you’re sampling a little wine as you cook.

I don’t know about you, but for every moment I have like this, I have probably a dozen or so when we’ve finally made it home from work and are ravenous. And chances are, we’re hoping to run an errand or get to the library or the gym or something after we eat. So we’ve got maybe 3.2 seconds to get dinner pulled together. Sure, we can throw in the towel and grab some carry-out [and there are plenty of times we do], but when we rise to the occasion and get something good on the table quickly that we’ve made ourselves, it feels pretty good.

The challenge here is to embrace the moment for what it is and savor this kind of cooking experience as much as the extravagant weekend celebration of food. Maybe it’s my over-caffeinated approach to life—my Brooklyn buddy has likened me to a border collie [you have to know the breed to get the comparison]—but I’ve actually come to often prefer the high-speed kitchen.

Here’s a quick and delicious dish I pretty much invented in one of those 90-mph moments. No, you won’t get it on the table in 3.2 seconds [hey, I work in advertising—hyperbole is my stock in trade], but if you’ve already got the ingredients on hand, chances are you can beat the pizza delivery guy. Continue reading “The Joy of Cooking, at 90 miles an hour” →

Blue Kitchen: Playing with your food

Campanelle with Sausage and Red Bell Pepper proves what a blank canvas and invitation to improvise pasta can be. Recipe below.

Sometimes a cookbook can greatly influence how you cook, even if you never make a single recipe from it. We had a pasta cookbook around the house for years and finally got rid of it in one of our periodic purges when we realized we never used it. Ever. But the author said something in the introduction that completely changed the way I thought about pasta, so it wasn’t money wasted, as far as I was concerned.

His family lived in Italy for a year when he was a boy. Their housekeeper made pasta at least once a day, every day, for that year. In that time, she never made what many of us think of as the classic Italian pasta with red sauce, not once. And she never repeated herself.

When I got over being stunned and amazed by this feat—and it wasn’t a blinding flash of inspiration, but rather a long process of seeing various recipes in various sources, perusing menus in Italian restaurants and, finally, just facing ingredients on hand in my own kitchen—I realized that pasta can be like the perfect basic jazz melody that invites countless amazing improvisations.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good red sauce. It’s just that there are so many other more interesting things to be done with pasta. There are various cream sauces, for instance, and dishes that involve baking the pasta. I’ll save those for another day. Today I’m going to cover a breathtakingly simple technique that will give you all the room in the world to improvise and create your own wonderful meal. Continue reading “Blue Kitchen: Playing with your food” →